ABSTRACT
The convergence is aided by the increasing similarity, in higher education, of the paradigm for research and the paradigm for teaching. Since the main rationale of corpora in teaching is their immediate availability for students’ use, it is important that the students should be able to acquire the necessary ‘hands on’ know-how, so that they can explore corpora for their own purposes. The arguments about corpora in direct language teaching are of equal relevance to language testing. One of the continuing difficulties for applications of corpora to language/linguistics teaching is the lack of suitable corpora. Language for Specific Purposes has an important place in the goals of language teaching. Developmental corpora may be expected to provide a detailed picture of a type of language which corresponds most closely to target language behaviour of school-age non-native learners. One final category of corpus should be mentioned: the bilingual or multilingual corpus, containing comparable text materials in different languages.
